The Jilin Animation Institute is an incredible undertaking. It’s now celebrating over ten years of operation.  The student base is over 10,500.  That’s NOT a typo.  10,500 students….the largest animation student enrollment in the world!  To support these students is a staff of 1,400 instructors, teachers, technicians and artists including a smattering of foreign nationals.  The institute is in the process of expanding its campus to accommodate up to 20,000 students within the next few years.

 

 

 

 

 

My book, HOW TO WRITE FOR ANIMATION, has just been released for the Kindle and other eBook formats. Read what Jeffrey Katzenberg, Stan Lee and others have to say about it . . .

It’s Friday, October 12 and the Javits Center is beginning to burst at the seams. Banes abound, Lokis lurk and there are Doctors by the dozens. David Tennants and Matt Smiths predominate, although a Peter Davison Doctor shows up at Peter Davison’s session. Speaking of which, You Can’t Make this Stuff Up Department: Davison’s daughter Georgia is married to Tennant; they met when she played the title role in the Dr. Who episode… “The Doctor’s Daughter.” (Yeah, I can’t believe it either but it’s true.)

The artist looks for ways to demonstrate that all people in the world are fundamentally the same. The politician looks for ways to show that one group of people is superior to another.

 

Nature’s unsurpassed poetic, imaginative, intricate and glorious artistic ingenunity, the range of infinite design resources through which it is able to express its ideas and experimentation, are never captured visualized as magnificently as in astoundingly delicate designs Nature never seems to run out of, be shy about, or short on alternate renditions of its explorations, all in its perpetual strive for utter perfection.

On the specific topic of film, there is the Francois Truffaut auteur theory, which suggests that in order for a film to be recognized as art, there must be one guiding hand on the entire project.  This is to say that the auteur must be all things to the film – He or she must write the screenplay, cast the actors, direct and edit the film in order for it to be considered a work of art.  Truffaut allows that others may set the lights, operate the cameras and fill other duties but all creative decisions must be solely and strictly that of the filmmaker. 

The question is how does this definitioin fit in animation where the vast majority of films are made with a team of artists and technicians working together, often independently?  

 

The Javits Convention Center was bustling but navigable Thursday; Friday's edition was massively attended. (Calling the packed crowd milling about the main concourse ‘a sea of people’ wouldn’t begin to do it justice; a better comparison would be to Times Square on New Year’s Eve.) Come the weekend I suspect everyone who bought a ticket to the completely sold-out event will be here today.

 

Building a stop-motion animation studio can be a challenging endeavor.  Especially when that studio is located on the 31^st floor of a corporate office building right smack in Midtown Manhattan.  As MTV animation VP John Lynn, animation supervisor Greg Pair and I imagined the logistics of producing a stop motion TV series, there really was no other choice.  There was no model for how to do a show like this because nothing like it had ever been attempted.  So we took the basic template for making the original Deathmatch shorts and expanded it out.

It’s important to find out what makes you tick, but realizing that there are some fundamental outliers at play helps you to manage your expectations and come to the table ready to be present and make the most of what you have to offer.  If you are tired of being pushed and pulled and feel like a leaf in the wind blowing from one vacant lot to another, try applying the “Four C” principles to your career and see if you it provides you with a foundation on which to build your career castle.

 

 

 

 

Everybody knows that Moe Howard, as well as his fellow Stooges, were creative geniuses. But not so many know that Moe’s son-in-law, Norman Maurer, was a genius in his own right.